Civil Commotion

Yesterday’s unsubstantiated claim by Donald Trump that his phones had been tapped by Barack Obama, and today’s announcement by Sean Spicer that Trump will say no more about the matter unless the Senate investigates, fit together nicely. First, he slimes his predecessor, and then he tries to close discussion while leaving the allegation in play.

Even diehard fans must be starting to wonder what they’ve done. Certainly, Republican lawmakers are wondering what sort of deranged freak they’ve hitched their wagons to. Nobody of ordinary intelligence can possibly imagine that a new, mature, sane Donald Trump is going to appear; he is nuts, and that is how he’s going to stay.

So: How long till this bad cartoon comes to an end? Removing a president is such a weighty step that even his most perfervid detractors will hesitate for a while, so I’m thinking 6-months to a year before the disgust and anxiety overtake him.

The catalog of church abuses is now so long, the list of barely comprehensible indecencies, the tally of lives ruined … one scarcely notices the headlines any longer.

But I think we’re all going to remember these headlines for a while.

I love that: “… lost their grip on reality” — from a man who thinks that repeating any lie loud enough and often enough will make it true.

This is all so reminiscent of the Watergate scandal — except that was ordinary humdrum corruption, rather than giving aid and comfort to one of America’s enemies — that it borders on eerie. Then, for a long while, there was only one news outlet chasing the story, the Washington Post; now, we have the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN. Every day there is another tidbit, and with every tidbit a couple more of his party take a step back. Every week, the basic integrity and fitness for governance of yet another of The Donald’s team is put in question. Then, Nixon routinely lashed-out at vague, mysterious forces conspiring against him — the press, the Democrats, whomever; now, Trump does the same.

Eventually, the guilty realized that their secrets were coming out and they began making deals hoping to spin the news and protect themselves; the daily drip-drip-drip became a trickle, a stream, uncontrollable cataracts. The party functionaries who had hoped to profit by turning a blind eye to Nixon’s serial indecencies began clubbing and tripping-over each other as they raced for the exits. Today, Republicans who just last week were blithely indifferent to Trump’s corruption are demanding investigations.

In the mid-70s, you had to wait till the 6:00 o’clock news, or the next morning’s newspaper, to get the latest installment; now, you get a tweet just as soon as the story moves on the wire. The pace of disintegration is a lot faster, but not the pattern.

Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.

Donald Trump

This is either another lie, or Donald Trump is the dumbest man to ever set foot in the White House. Everybody knows it is complicated, that there are a bazillion moving parts. Some of us even remember that a solid year of public debate and discussion preceded passage of the ACA, and that there have been countless courthouse brawls since then.

Seriously? He thought it would be easy to repeal, or repeal and replace, or repair, or whatever? Or is he merely preparing a feeble excuse to his base, at least some of whom are doubtless acquiring at least a glimmer of a suspicion that The Donald is nothing but an amoral con man?

It was announced last week that astronomers have discovered seven more exoplanets, planets that might be able to sustain our sort of life. Naturally, Albert the Pious hastens to take the fun out of dreamy speculations about other life in the universe.

Now at this point Christians should immediately recognize we’re talking about what some scientists call the Cosmic Anthropic Principle. That is, the principal that makes very clear that planet Earth happens to be calibrated along with our own solar system and universe in such a way that it is precisely right for the emergence and nurturing of life, that is, precisely right. The Cosmic Anthropic Principle reminds us that if planet earth were just slightly outside its current orbit, life would be impossible because it would be to cold. On the other hand, if planet earth were to be even slightly inside its current orbit, the Earth would be too hot for life also to be possible. So we are in effect as a planet right in the middle of our own Goldilocks zone. The question is, why?

This is where Christians understand that this is a tremendous and direct testimony to the divine creation of the universe and to God’s intention on this one planet to create human beings and other forms of life. That is what is crucial to the Cosmic Anthropic Principle. In other words, it takes a great deal of denial to suggest that somehow this is just a tremendous cosmic accident. But if you do believe that it is a cosmic accident, then you must wonder if it’s an accident that has happened elsewhere also.

Notice: “… what some scientists call …” By an overwhelming majority, scientists reject that so-called principle. What most scientists believe — excepting that unidentified some, most of them associated with the Creation Museum or the Discovery Institute and unfit for academic appointments — is not that the universe was created to accommodate us, but that we evolved to survive on the earth we’ve got with its magic-number distance from the sun, et cetera, et cetera.

But this raises some fun theological questions. If there is other life in the universe — and, at least statistically, it is almost a certainty that there is — is that life, too, tainted by Original Sin? And imperiled by an eternity in hell if it doesn’t accept that a 1^st-century hippie, on a different planet, served as a blood-sacrifice for their sins?

And how is that message conveyed? “Long, long ago, in the beginning, on a planet far away …” Ha! I’ll bet there’s no shortage of skeptics on the planet Xeno, either. And wouldn’t it just figure that it’s the True Believers who want to ZAP earth with a high-energy photon beam?